Understand the telecommunications services and effectively manage the costs of those services. We explains in nontechnical language the most common telecom technologies and services in today’s marketplace. These services fall into four categories: local, long distance, data, and wireless services. Each service offering has its own unique type of bill.

Announcement Systems And Messages On Hold

The most basic building block in the suite of technologies I call voice processing is the announcer. An announcer simply answers an incoming telephone call and plays a recorded message.

Digital announcers use a computer chip to store the recorded message. Other systems use tape to store the message, similar to the way an answering machine does. (Word of advice: stick to digital. Tape is too delicate, too cumbersome, and hard to edit. Digital is not just the future; it’s the present.)

You can have the system play a message and simply hang up, or ring the caller through to your phone system after playing the message if they choose to stay on the line for more information.

Announcers can also work with ACDs to play messages to callers in queue. You can program a message to simply thank the caller for holding, play on-hold music, or even better, play recorded promotional messages.

Because an announcer is so simple, it doesn’t have the high-tech appeal of other voice processing technologies. But announcers are vital to most call centers and many other businesses because they play music and messages to callers waiting on hold or in queue for a call center agent.

Call centers turn to sophisticated technologies like computer integration to save a few seconds per call — and may spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so. But few stop to think that a simple announcement on hold that tells callers to have a credit card ready can save that same call center five seconds per call at almost no cost.

When choosing an announcer the most important thing you’ll need to decide is the amount of recording time you’ll need.